Barnardo's chief: in the best interests of the children

Anne Marie Carrie says the pre-departure accommodation centre Barnardo's runs for asylum-seeker families is the right thing to do

'We're responsible for the social welfare and care of those families ... I am not the UKBA and I am not G4S,' says Anne Marie Carrie, Barnardo's chief executive. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

"If not us, then who?" Anne Marie Carrie is fond of asking when talking about the decision of Barnardo's to provide welfare and social care services at Cedars, the "pre-departure accommodation centre" (PDA) that opened a year ago. The centre holds failed asylum-seeking families before they are deported.

The decision – the charity's most controversial since Carrie took over as chief executive in January 2011 – provoked fury from anti-child detention campaigners, who accused Barnardo's of allowing a rebranded version of child detention to continue when the coalition government had promised to end it. Carrie is noticeably uncomfortable and increasingly defensive discussing the issue.

"Do I wish the PDA didn't need to exist? Absolutely," she says. But the only alternative, she believes, would be separating children from their parents in their final hours in the country and having them looked after by foster carers. "All the evidence I'd looked at says to rip children from their parents at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives ... I don't know if that's a best-interest decision," she explains.

The security of Cedars is managed by G4S for the UK Border Agency (UKBA). When it opened, Barnardo's set out a series of "red lines" and Carrie insisted the charity would speak out if it saw any signs of failure to safeguard the "welfare, dignity and respect of families", ultimately withdrawing its services if necessary.

A year since the first family arrived, have the lines been crossed? No, says Carrie, although the examples she gives are piecemeal. She says she wrote to the immigration minister when a family was at Cedars for 15 minutes longer than the initial 72-hour limit without the necessary ministerial approval.

Carrie says she raised concerns about children being picked up from Cedars at 6am for lunchtime flights out of Heathrow, asking whether such an early start is necessary. Similarly, she says she has acted when she has felt families have not been treated with respect by non-Barnardo's staff.

"I said we would speak out about what's happening [if red lines are crossed] and I have," she insists.

G4S now has better practice on transporting families thanks to the charity's influence, she claims – though campaigning organisations such as Medical Justice allege that dawn raids and excessive force still feature.

Asked about another issue that campaigners think she should use her influence over – the provision of malaria drugs and bed nets for returning families – Carrie replies: "We're responsible for the social welfare and care of those families in Cedars ... I am not the UKBA, and I am not G4S." She raps on the table at each name. "If there are issues about G4S and UKBA, they [campaigners] should rightly take them up with that authority."

Resilience

Raised on Glasgow's Easterhouse estate, the daughter of a cleaner and a window cleaner, Carrie won a place at drama college, but after a fortnight was told there had been a mistake in the admissions process and she would have to leave. She enrolled on a course that taught her how to repair televisions and radios instead, and was good at it. But she left a year later to return to drama college, the first of 27 cousins to reach higher education. "It taught me a lot about resilience," she says.

After teaching drama, Carrie moved into education and then family and children's services in local government, ending up as deputy chief executive of Kensington and Chelsea council. She hadn't considered the third sector until she was headhunted by Barnardo's, where she took over as chief executive from Martin Narey. She loves seeing the charity's work on the ground, and has found she is good at asking people for money. But what she doesn't like, she readily admits, is "the public profile bit".

Carrie will, however, speak up when she feels the government is getting it wrong. "They have an aspiration to be the most family-friendly government, and on the ground it doesn't feel that way," she says.

Three areas she feels particularly strongly about are the abolition of education maintenance allowance (a Barnardo's report earlier this year found its "disastrous" replacement, the bursary fund, meant many more disadvantaged young people were being left with minimal or no funding); the proposed scrapping of housing benefit for under-25s; and plans to charge parents if the child support agency has to get involved in their child maintenance claims.

She gives credit where she believes it is due, applauding the coalition's moves on foster care and adoption, and calling its focus on early intervention and the early years foundation "absolutely spot on". But she says local authority spending cuts have fallen disproportionately on crucial family intervention projects and work. "We're just storing up problems and it's so short-sighted," she says.

So-called "troubled families" are a mainstay of the work of Barnardo's. Carrie says the original criteria for defining them invented a correlation between poor families and antisocial ones. "In Barnardo's we don't judge, so I would talk about troubled and troublesome," she says.

But isn't troublesome a label too? Some families are troublesome in their communities, and it is about support and challenge, she replies. Families have told her they like Barnardo's staff because they "don't take any crap". "That's when I know it's about saying: 'Your behaviour and the behaviour of your kids is causing problems for your neighbours'," Carrie says. "I don't think that's labelling."

'Workfare' scheme

Barnardo's is, controversially, involved in the government's "Workfare" scheme. When public outrage came to a head in February, Barnardo's, along with other employers, forced the government into a U-turn, saying it could not accept the 3,000 vulnerable young people it trains each year having a fortnight's unemployment benefit docked if they failed to complete an unpaid eight-week compulsory work experience placement.

It did not withdraw from the scheme, however, and still faces the ire of campaigners. Carrie is adamant Barnardo's is doing the right thing. "For our children, who are the furthest away from apprenticeships and work, work experience is a lifeline. I was thinking: 'Goodness, everyone's going to withdraw from this and I won't be able to get work experience for some of the children we work with'."

In an era of outsourcing and cuts, is the independent voice Carrie values compromised by the need to secure deals? "I would rather lose a statutory contract than do something that we don't believe is in the best interests of children," she says. But she adds: "One of the big things in going forward is to raise more independent funds so we can do more independent work and retain our independent voice."

Returning to Cedars, she says she has no regrets. "I know I'm not going to win any popularity poll on this." But emphasising each word separately, she says: "It is the right thing to do."